Biblical Wanderings: Mark 2 and 11

Then a paralytic was brought to him, carried by four. Since they were unable to get to him through the crowd, they uncovered the roof above him, made an opening, and lowered the paralytic on his mat. And Jesus saw their faith, and said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” (Mark 2:3-5)

And they were walking back in the morning, and saw the fig tree withered from the roots. Peter remembered and said, “Look, Rabbi! The fig tree you cursed has withered.” “Have faith in God,” Jesus said to them. “Truly I tell you that if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea’, and has no separation from this desire in his heart, but believes that it will happen, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, as much as you ask in prayer, believe that you have received, and it will be yours. And when you stand to pray, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive, so that your father in heaven will forgive your trespasses as well.” (Mark 11:20-25)

“There is nothing wrong with you.” Love wrote this in my journal last week, after a half an hour of waiting, pen to paper. Instantly I felt great relief. He didn’t mean that there was nothing wrong with my body - that would have been a cruel message, after spending the last few days in bed, feeling histamine waves soar through my body, limbs buzzing madly, stomach white-hot as it tried to digest my latest meal. What his message reassured me of was that there was nothing wrong with me. It wasn’t my fault I was sick. There wasn’t something I was doing wrong that had cursed my life to be what it was. It simply was what it was, and it had nothing to do with me - the real me. 

In my experience, it’s almost impossible to be sick without also feeling wrong. Sickness places a barrier between us and the usual comforts of society. People say they hope you’ll feel better soon, and you imagine a deadline being placed in their mind, their increasing impatience and demand on you if you don’t feel better soon. “Do you know what caused this relapse?” translates in my mind to: what did you do this time? “Have you tried x type of doctor/treatment yet?” translates to: why haven’t you fixed yourself yet? People offer their kindnesses and sympathies in whatever ways they know how, and none of it sinks in, and you feel awful for it. I’m not just sick, I’m a bad person - wouldn’t a better person be able to receive this comfort? Shouldn’t it make a difference? 

It isn’t surprising to me that Jesus forgives the sick man’s sins before he heals his body. He is a healer of the soul first, and in comparison with bodily pain, that guilty, anxious, unending torment is the far worse suffering. 

But that’s at the start of Mark, when we have a healthy Jesus, healing the sick. By the time we get to the story of the fig tree, it’s Jesus that is in distress. He knows he’s facing his imminent end, knows that this trip to Jerusalem will be his last. He is staring death in the face, and yet must continue getting on with the basic necessities of life. This is the paradox that every sick person finds themselves in: figuring out how to live while being exiled from life. I can’t help but read his words here as more of a reminder to himself than a lesson to his disciples. Why did he curse the fig tree? Why does anyone curse anything? It’s being in that cursed state, that state of exile, where we feel a million miles away from everyone and everything, and are expected to traverse that distance for every interaction and task we’re faced with. Divorced from love and grace, the lines of empathy and connection that bond us with life - many of which we don’t see even in good health - vanish into the haze of alienation.

There’s nothing harder than believing in love and life in the face of this world as we encounter it. Those times of easy comfort, when we feel safe in our bodies and our surroundings, seem like little oases stretched out among a vast and desolate landscape. We encounter some intuitive understanding of what it’s like to be loved, and then that intuition is stripped away, and we’re asked to keep believing it as we walk through the fire.

Maybe that’s why Jesus reminds his disciples, or himself, or his father, to forgive: because he knows now how hard it is. Nobody knows how hard it is to walk this life until they start walking it. That is the power of the story of Jesus - that he was willing to walk through it, to encounter every emotion and situation and every darkness that a human faces. That is the thrill of our own lives, that we might be willing to walk through and live through a reality that has more pain and more complexity and more beauty than our minds and bodies are built to comprehend. No human can walk that path without falling, because we’re not built for it. But we are built to harbor and bring forth these immense powers of belief and empathy, to dig a well in the desert and find water.

For thirty years of my life I was terrified about getting sick. The idea that the thing I was currently doing might lead to long-term health complications down the road, or that the pain I was feeling might be cancer, kept me in a state of constant distraction. Then I actually got sick, and discovered that in 30 years I had never been well. I had lived with this anxiety, assuming it was an innate part of myself; I had listened to the stories it told. Once I was sick, I found out that these stories were…incomplete. After all, how could my anxiety have the whole picture, tell an accurate story, if I’d never actually lived through a sickness? So I did start living through sickness, and discovered that there was life in sickness. I encountered love while being sick. I learned and grew stronger within myself while I was sick. My body got better, than worse again, then hovered, then changed. Simple narratives about success and failure, a healthy life or a descent towards death, did not apply. All I could say, all I can say, is that I’m living inside a less-than-perfect body.

What is this thing called life that flows through our veins? Surely we understand it to be more than a beating heart and breathing lungs. When we speak of life we speak of happiness, hope, the ability to see morning sunlight and call it beautiful, the spirit that drives us to engage with the larger world. When these things fade out of our life, what is left? Can it be called life? Yet the paralyzed man didn’t need happiness and hope; all he needed was patience and forbearance with his friends, who did have hope, as they tried increasingly reckless ways to bring him back into the fullness of life. This less-than-perfect body is a workshop, where everything is uncertain and experimental, where necessity is the mother of invention, where the gritty realities of mortal life are revealed in all their painful glory. Job screams, “I am nothing but skin and bones; I have escaped only by the skin of my teeth,” and three thousand years later, I’m listening as I lie in bed and he’s killing me softly with his song, telling my whole life with his words. Those who are reduced to skin and bones sing the deepest, most beautiful elegies. We learn the truth about life when we decide to walk through it, and we carry that truth to everyone we meet.